Top 10 Stories

A group led by BT of industry giants are working with the Cyber Security Challenge UK to design the most realistic cyber-terror attack ever created in central London’s most famous landmarks. The consortium, including GCHQ, National Crime Agency, Lockheed Martin, Juniper and Airbus Group, are putting the finishing touches to Britain’s biggest ever hacker competition to investigate and prevent attacks by cyber terrorists aiming to cause real-world damage that could bring physical harm to citizens in central...

Some half-fixed websites retain some vulnerability to the Heartbleed bug.   According to researchers at the 2014 Internet Measurement Conference in Vancouver, while sys admins may have run in the necessary patches, they haven't gotten around to revoking the PKI certificates their sites had before the bug was discovered.   As explained by assistant research scientist Dave Levin, sites needed to “patch their OpenSSL software, they needed to revoke their current certificates, and they needed...

There has been a 307 per cent rise in reported cyber crime in Mumbai.   According to the Mumbai police, 418 cases have been registered until October compared with the 136 cases registered in the first 10 months last year.   Dhananjay Kulkarni, deputy commissioner of police (detection) and Mumbai police spokesperson, said, “We are stressing on capacity building. A considerable number of officers from the 93 police stations in the city are being trained...

A yearly $10bn effort to protect sensitive Government data is struggling to keep pace with an increasing number of cyber attacks.   According to a report by the Guardian, data from military secrets to social security numbers is being unwittingly being undermined by federal employees and contractors.   Workers scattered across more than a dozen agencies, from the defence and education departments to the National Weather Service, are responsible for at least half of the federal...

Browser testing service BrowserStack has temporarily suspended its services while it recovers from a "hack attack".   In an update to its Twitter account on Monday, it said it did get hacked and that "The hacker’s access was restricted solely to a list of email addresses”.   The admission came after developers who used the service received an email from BrowserStack suggesting that the service is shutting down. That suggested that BrowserStack was "vulnerable to hacking" (self-evidently...

After the Home Depot attack was enabled by hackers using a Windows machine as a point of entry, the retailer has purchased new and secure MacBooks and iPhones for executives.   Unsure about what information had been compromised, Home Depot “bought two dozen new, secure iPhones and MacBooks for senior executives, who referred to their new devices as ‘Bat phones.’”   It’s not clear what vulnerability in Windows the hackers exploited, but Microsoft patched it after the...

DARPA is funding a new project by Rice University called PLINY.   Named after Pliny the Elder who wrote one of the earliest encyclopedias ever, this will be a tool that can automatically complete a programmer's draft, working like the autocomplete on a smartphone.   Its developers describe it as a repository of terabytes upon terabytes of all the open-source code they'll find, which people will be able to query in order to easily create complex software...

A Twitter user has been found guilty of posting a "malicious" weblink which brought down the Home Office website.   A jury at Birmingham Crown Court found Mark Johnson guilty of encouraging or assisting the hacking effort, even though he denied posting links to his profile encouraging people to join a co-ordinated cyber attack on the page in 2012.   He was also found guilty of encouraging web users to participate in a distributed denial...

Privacy campaigners have welcomed news that the European Commission will add specific forms of surveillance technology to its control list on dual use items.   This will mean taking steps to hold companies who sell spy equipment and enable human rights abuses to account.   By adding intrusion software and IP monitoring to the control list, this places exporters of surveillance technology such as FinFisher, Hacking Team andAmesys under more scrutiny as now they will...

The website of Nottinghamshire Police has not long been compromised by Pro-Palestinian hackers.   With a message claiming “We are here to punish you since you have been supporting Israel because we are the voice of Palestine and we will not remain silent”, the page also played a MIDI version of The Exorcist theme playing in the background.   There was nothing on the page which would have caused any form of infection, Notts Police are currently...